James Gurney

This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.

CG Art

Contact

or by email:gurneyjourney (at) gmail.comSorry, I can't give personal art advice or portfolio reviews. If you can, it's best to ask art questions in the blog comments.

Permissions

All images and text are copyright 2015 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.

However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

My illustration of the tyrannosaurid Teratophoneus taking down a Gryposaurus appears in the issue of Scientific American that's on the newsstands now.

One of the inspirations for the painting was this 1897 painting of Laelaps by Charles Knight (1874-1953). Knight was one of the founding figures of paleoart, working more than a century ago.

He started out by drawing living animals at the zoo, then studied animal anatomy and worked at the American Museum of Natural History. Despite obstacles like vision problems, he went on to paint many murals and illustrations reconstructing extinct life forms. His work has influenced several generations of artists and filmmakers throughout the 20th century.

An excellent new coffee table book on Knight by author and anthropologist Richard Milner has just been released. It tells his life story, shows a lot of his drawings, and explains how he developed his remarkable vision of extinct life.

12 comments:

I first heard about Knight through a graphic novel about the early days of fossil hunting, 'Bone sharps, cowboys, and thunder lizards: a tale of Edwin Drinker Cope ...' by Jim Ottavianihttp://books.google.ca/books?id=VL1ZbFG53PkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=thunderlizards&hl=en&sa=X&ei=df9lT5_lC4j20gGJhtTCCA&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=thunderlizards&f=false

This link has several page scans, with a young Knight appearing on page 11. We see him go through the process of creating his own research to in order to understand dinosaurs as living animals, visiting reptile experts, zoos and paleotologists. There's a sequence showing him painting this very picture, using models he made himself.

Charles Knight is definitely one of my artistic inspirations. Not only was his work all over the dinosaur books and multimedia I owned as a child, but now as a student I admire his attention to anatomically accurate reconstruction, and his willingness to think outside of the box of contemporary conventional paleontology to portray his extinct subjects with a kind of dynamism that few others before him had dared to.

Kessie: from my understanding it wasn't that unusual at that time. Progressive, yes, but IIRC not too controversial until dinosaur palaeontology took a big step back in the early-mid 20thC - to the grey tail-dragging cold-bloods we all know and loathe.

(Well, maybe not 'loathe'. 'Cringe at', possibly)

I need to find somewhere that sells SA over here. Not easy to stumble across.